Beyond the accelerator: Top 5 lessons from a startup

We know that starting up a business is hard, really really hard. Especially when you’re creating a business that’s focused on tackling a pressing social problem.

Incubation programmes like the Bethnal Green Ventures accelerator play an important role in supporting entrepreneurs through the early stages, by providing intensive mentoring, funding and space to develop an idea. But what happens after you leave the incubation nest?

Six months into their startup, Samiya (Sam) and Naveed Parvez share some of the lessons they’ve learnt along the way.

The story so far

Sam, Naveed and co-founder Lee Provost joined the Bethnal Green Ventures (BGV) accelerator programme in January this year, to develop Andiamo. The idea behind Andiamo was to use 3D scanning and printing to revolutionise the way that children’s orthotics are made.

Through the first-hand experience of their son, Sam and Naveed had witnessed the stress and trauma created by the existing process for moulding orthotics for children. They saw the potential to reduce waiting times from 28 weeks to 48 hours and create better orthotics by using 3D printing technology, and they set out to design a service around this.

Andiamo left the BGV accelerator in March after three months of intensive support, and they have been insanely busy since then. They’ve travelled a lot, speaking at events like EMC World[3] in Vegas and Solid[4] in San Francisco, they were listed as one of the 12 most promising European startups in the Tech All Stars[5] competition, and they’ve been meeting lots of investors… lots and lots of investors.

It’s been a whirlwind rollercoaster of highs and lows, but behind every low there’s a lesson. Here, Sam and Naveed share five lessons they’ve learnt over the past six months:

1. When you’re starting out it takes a long time and a lot of hard work before you make any money

According to Naveed, one of the most useful pieces of advice they got on the accelerator programme was from one of the teams that had been through BGV before: “They were grittily honest. They said you’re not going to have any money for year. It’s going to take you more than 12 months to raise money and you’re going to have to talk to hundreds of investors. That was good mental preparation,” he says.

Sam says you should start adjusting your lifestyle before you take the plunge and start a business: “You should get used to being poor before you start! You’ve got to pare down your life. In a lot of respects, this was more daunting than starting the business.”

2. You’ve got to find the right kind of investors

Naveed and Sam spent a lot of time and energy meeting countless venture capital (VC) investors before they realised that these weren’t the right type of funders for their business model.

“We’ve spoken to so many investors,” explains Naveed, “They make all these promises, and then they just disappear and you don’t know why. That journey was painful.”

Sam warns that there’s a lot of startup hype out there, and some social entrepreneurs have unrealistic expectations about how easy it is to raise investment from a VC: “We’ve been speaking to a lot of social entrepreneurs and I think there’s a lot of commercial naïveté out there,” she says, “Just because you think something is the right thing to do, it doesn’t mean the market is going to give you money for it.”

The team has a new strategy for funding now. They plan to launch a crowdfunding campaign later in the summer (more info here[6]), and they’re starting to target specific high net worth individuals who have a personal affiliation with the problem that Andiamo is trying to solve.

“Madonna’s daughter Lourdes had a back brace, and even with all the money in the world she would have had to go through the same process of getting it fitted,” explains Naveed, “We’re now working on finding these people who have the resources to help us fix this problem.”

3: Screw up quickly and cheaply

Fail often, fail fast, and fail cheaply. This has become a mantra in the startup world, and it’s something that resonates strongly with the Naveed and Sam.

The process of talking to all those investors and getting rejected was really painful, but it was useful, says Naveed: “We screwed up quickly and cheaply, and now we’ve moved on. It cost us three months of time and we iterated our slide deck maybe 50 or 60 times, but now our proposition is really tight and we know who we need to target.”

4: Find a customer

Sam’s advice for people starting out on an accelerator programme, is to do everything possible while you’re there to have someone that’s going to give you money at the end: “If you can’t find a customer in three months then you’ve probably got a problem,” she says.

Naveed explains that out of everyone in their class at BGV they probably faced the biggest challenge in finding a paying customer, because their sales cycle is so long: “For us, we knew the big money was with the NHS, however, we learnt that we could sell directly to the private sector relatively quickly. We learnt over time that different customers have different sales cycles, and when you’re starting out you should focus on working out how to serve those with the shorter cycles”.

5: Talk to lots of people, lots and lots of people

Naveed and Sam reckon they must have spoken to almost 600 people over the last six months. “The cheapest and quickest way to get going was to start talking to everyone, and then coming back as a team once a week to understand that feedback,” explains Naveed.

Sam adds: “You have to swallow your pride. You have to get into the mode that everyone is going to be useful.”

Sam says they’re now tracking all of their contacts, and they’ve got a system for making sure they can return and follow up on calls: “You need a way of structuring and remembering all the people and data, because you never know which conversation is going to come back and be amazing.”

What’s next for team Andiamo?

The accelerator programme acted as a tipping point for Sam, Naveed and Lee. It’s when Andiamo turned from an idea into a business. It forced Sam and Naveed to take the plunge and work on the business full time, and they made huge advances as they finally had the space and support to test their concept and develop their first prototype.

The support from the accelerator doesn’t stop after demo day. Andiamo will benefit from the programmes strong network and the peer support from the BGV alumni. They’re going to need this, as the next six months will be an even more challenging time for the team as they tackle the economic and commercial realities of what they’re doing.

Funding aside, Naveed has a clear idea of what they need to do next: “We would do six to 12 months of R&D around clinical trials, we’d open up a private clinic immediately, and then we’d use that as a blue print to work with the NHS and look at how we scale this globally,” he says.

They know what they need to do and they’ve built relationships with all the right people to turn this into a reality. Scan. Print. Change Lives. It’s as simple as that.